IGN: Are necessary supplies only found around towns, how do you lure players into situations where they'll encounter zombies?

Eric Nordin: Supplies can be found at places where you expect them to be. Ie – if you’re looking for guns, find a police station, military outpost, a gun store, or try to looks inside vehicles. Try to find npc’s diaries, read them and maybe they’ll point to some hidden stash.

Same goes for other items you can find in a game. Obviously it’s much easier to get something from a single standing house, that may have a few zombies at best, then from a police station in a large city infested with hundreds and thousands of zombies.

But more important – I think that most of the time it won’t be us luring players into the zombies nest J - it’ll be other players setting traps for you. After all – other humans are way more dangerous than zombies in the world of War Z.

IGN: What sorts of survival situations might players find themselves in? Do they have to worry about basic needs like food and water, is their a day / night cycle, how do you heal, what kind of medical problems can occur?

Eric Nordin: Players will need to worry about both food and water, they will need to find place to rest and restore stamina, and will have to use medical supplies to patch wounds and restore health. They will also need to worry about the zombie virus. Once a player has been bitten, their blood will become infected and they will need to find the zombie virus vaccine to cure themselves. If they don't do that, they slowly but surely will be transformed into a brain craving zombie.

While food and water are the most common resources in the world, players will have a harder time finding both medical supplies and vaccine. Vaccine is especially rare, available only either through the store in safe settlements or from other players.

There is a day/night cycle, each cycle is a few hours of real world time, so you’ll be able to play both daytime and night time.

IGN: Why include both first and third person perspectives for players to choose from?

Sergey Titov: In our experience with previous games we’ve funded (Online Warmongers published “War Inc Battle Zone”) we found that players like this, i.e.: there’s group of players that specifically want to play using third-person camera. So we decided, "why not to give them the option?" Plus first-person mode works better for combat situations, and third-person mode is better for exploring the world.

IGN: What do you think adding in the option for up to 250 players in a map adds to this type of game?

Sergey Titov: I think the world should feel real. It should be populated enough to create interesting encounter scenarios, it should allow for enough players to join to create interesting social interactions between different groups of players.

IGN: What sorts of party options do you plan on having? Can players form actual groups? Clans?

Eric Nordin: Players can form clans, clans can form alliances or fight each other. Players will be able to friend other players, join a game as groups, be able to communicate with their group members, friends, clan mates. It all will be managed from inside the game session as well as from the game frontend. There’ll be individual and clan leader boards as well.

IGN: What are safe settlements? Are these places where PVP simply isn't allowed? Doesn't that break the whole system of a land where your life is always in question?

Eric Nordin: Safe Settlements are settlements built to be safe from zombies in the day time and provide better protection at night. They are also the places where you can find Stores, Message Boards (allows you to post messages about looking for partners, groups or just announce a mission and reward for that mission completion, that can be picked up by other players) and what we refer to as the “post office” where you’ll be able to transfer items from your backpack to your “global inventory” that your other characters will be able to access from the front end menu.

Basically Safe Settlements are more social hubs for players.

PVP IS allowed in safe settlements, but by killing somebody you will not only receive an immediate bad reputation, but also will be attacked by NPC sentries guarding the settlement.

IGN: What sort of social elements will there be and how will they effect gameplay?

Eric Nordin: Outside standard things like chat, we’ll offer players the ability to leave “notes” – short messages that can be found by other players. Profanity aside, players will be able to write anything they want there – so for example you can tell players about danger ahead or you can set a trap for them by telling them that there are some cool items lying somewhere nearby and luring them into trap. You can also “call for help” – for example if you are low on health or your blood is contaminated with the zombie virus and you need immediate assistance – you can post this as a message available to all players on a server or just around your immediate area, and you can promise them a specific reward for helping you.

This alone can create some interesting scenarios – for example one time one of our engineers posted that he needed a zombie vaccine and he would give a very rare scope for an assault rifle in exchange. So he did this to test new code. The person who responded showed up and killed the poor bastard and looted his body. BUT, then he ended up being killed by another guy that came to help.

We also allow players to trade items, however they will need to think about how well they can trust the other person. For example, will he be honest with you? OR when you drop the item for trade will he kill you and take the item. We tested this part of the game and ran into some pretty interesting scenarios on for humans will behave in situations like this.